What is Automated Customer Service?

Automated customer service uses an automated system to provide customer service instead of, or more often, in conjunction with, human agents. Automated customer service is typically enabled by chatbots, answer bots, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Why Does Automated Customer Service Matter to Customer Service?

Automated customer service is priceless for companies because it allows customers to self-serve to answers and information around the clock. It also takes the pressure off customer service organizations to staff support channels with enough human agents to scale to any level of activity. This creates a faster, better customer experience and also reduces the cost of support for organizations.

Automated customer service can be a standalone option, like, at the simplest end of the spectrum, an FAQ where customers can self-serve to answers to common questions or an auto-responder for incoming email. Or, automated customer service can be integrated with your manual support options. For instance, triage might be handled by automated customer service, which then routes issues to human agents when necessary. Or, in a chat interface, an automated answer bot might answer questions whenever possible, transferring the conversation to an agent when it runs out of ideas or when the customer sentiment shifts.

How Helpshift SupportsAutomated Customer Service

Chat bots can be custom-built for any point along your customer journey. Helpshifts’s code-free visual interface helps you build bots quickly without the aid of a developer. Answer bots can be designed to answer incoming customer queries based on existing content from your knowledge base to help you deflect incoming tickets and reduce the overall number of tickets filed. When necessary, these bots will escalate conversations to human agents.

Intelligent issue classification hinges on AI algorithms specially designed by Helpshift to classify communication based on short incoming customer messages. Based on natural language processing (NLP), Helpshift’s AI classification engine constantly learns from prior interactions to get better and better at parsing language for ideal results.

And automated issue routing, in particular, uses AI to route incoming customer queries to the right channel or agent. Sometimes, this keeps the customer conversation within the automated customer service paradigm. Others, it calls in a human agent.